Farm Punk: Artists turn found objects into home furnishings

In a former bean processing plant in Skaneateles Junction, a horse-drawn iron scoop and an old wagon wheel are becoming a chair.

The chair joins other creations by Keith Traub and Theresa Daddona-Traub: a coffee table made from old barn boards and a metal fuel tank; wine racks made from bulldozer sprockets; and a lamp shade made from a sign for G.H. Fish, an old Auburn grocery store.

None of the raw materials are new. Everything is made of something that once served another purpose.

The couple call their style "Farm Punk."

"Keith is more the farm, and I'm more the punk," Theresa said.

Keith, 39, and Theresa, 41, grew up a mile and a half from each other in Allentown, Pa., but didn't meet until 1999. They met through Theresa's brother, Don, a friend of Keith's.

They married and had two children, ages 16 and 7. They bought, renovated and lived in an 1870s schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and then moved to Colorado for three years.

Always, they dreamed of opening a studio and making art from reclaimed objects.

Theresa still has a sign she designed for their someday studio, then called Astro Designs.

Farm Punk from Unite Two DesignKeith Traub, and his wife, Theresa Daddona-Traub, formed Unite Two Design, a company that makes furniture, jewelry and home accessories from reclaimed materials. Keith gives a tour of some of the items in their gallery, UTD, in Skaneateles.

"We had visions of this in Pennsylvania," Theresa said. "We wanted to do this for a long time."

In 2010, they attended a wedding in Skaneateles and were struck by the area's beauty. They took a family vote, and Fort Collins, Colo., lost to moving back East.

A friend noticed a faded, hand-painted sign advertising space for rent at the former Vanderveer Coleman bean processing plant, a collection of four buildings next to railroad tracks in Skaneateles Junction, also called Hart's Lot.

The plant operated through the 1940s, supplying dried soy and navy beans to troops fighting World War II.

"The equipment and the signs are still there," Traub said. "It looks like they just turned off the switch and left."

It took more than a year to transform the storage building they rented into a light-filled workshop.

They started selling their creations online and got noticed by DIY Network and the design websites houzz.com and apartmenttherapy.com, among others.

Sept. 7, they opened a gallery at 37 Fennell St., Skaneateles, downstairs from Long Lake Custom Framing and next door to Creekside Books & Coffee.

The gallery gives them a local outlet -- fitting since many of their raw materials, with their histories and back stories, are from here, they said.

Most of the wood came from barns in Marcellus and Canandaigua. They're still using chestnut from the schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.

They'll clean up old barns and buildings in exchange for materials, a good deal for many property owners. There's a junkyard in Seneca Falls that lets them wander through and buy by the pound. Increasingly, people bring materials they think the couple can use.

They collect stop signs, road signs, tractor gears, wheels, springs, chains and leftover construction materials, including an I-beam from a remodel at a school in the Jordan-Elbridge district. Interesting colors and shapes catch their eye. An old kerosene pump will soon have a second life as a liquor cabinet.

"Wood is plentiful. Steel is getting harder to come by," Keith said.

The bulldozer sprockets-turned-wine racks came from a steel shop in Pennsylvania where Keith, a mechanic and steel fabricator, used to work. He saw a lot of waste there, he said.

"That's where a lot of this comes from. I saw how much stuff goes into the Dumpster that was still good," he said.

Growing up, he spent a lot of time on a gentleman's farm owned by his Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents, fixing and building things and working on motors.

"We used what we had on hand to make stuff work," he said.

The couple co-design. Keith does the steel work, and Theresa refinishes the wood and makes jewelry. The wood is refinished with tung oil or milk paint.

"The materials are ever-changing. We don't draw designs until we have the materials on hand," Keith said.

"Sometimes the materials will speak to me, and sometimes not.

"We try and leave things as natural as possible. It adds to the beauty of it."